Who would have thought that ‘safety in the workplace’ would eventually extend to our homes? As we navigate the new normal, work-from-home arrangements have emerged as a key component of business continuity plans. This episode unravels the intricacies of health and safety management for remote workers, as we investigate the findings of the paper, "A Systems Model for the Design of Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems, Inclusive of Work from Home Arrangements," published in the Journal of Applied Ergonomics. As we share our candid thoughts on the study conducted, we voice our concerns about the imbalance in participant representation.
Lastly, we delve into the role of leadership in addressing psychosocial hazards, the importance of standardized guidance for remote work, and the challenges faced by line managers in managing remote workers. We wrap up the episode by providing a toolkit for managers to effectively navigate the challenges of remote work, and highlight the need for tailored safety strategies for different work arrangements.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
"There's a risk that we're missing important contributions from workers with different needs, neurodiverse workers, workers with mental health issues, workers with particular reasons for working at home and we’re not going to be able to comment on the framework and how it might affect them." - Drew
“When organizations' number of incident reports go up and up and up and we struggle to understand, is that a sign of worsening safety or is that a sign of better reporting?” - David
“They do highlight just how inconsistent organisations approaches are and perhaps the need for just some sort of standardised guidance on what is an organisation responsible for when you ask to work from home, or when they ask you to work from home.” - Drew
“I think a lot of people's response to work from home is let's try to subtly discourage it because we're uncomfortable with it, at the same time as we recognise that it's probably inevitable.” - Drew
Resources:
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
Drew: You're listening to The Safety of Work Podcast, episode 114. Today, we're asking the question, how do we manage safety for work from home workers? Let's get started.
Hey, everybody. My name is Drew Rae. I'm here with David Provan. We're from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to The Safety of Work Podcast.
In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and we examined the evidence surrounding it. Today, we have a paper that is mainly about the work of safety in a particular domain, which is trying to manage the safety of workers who are at home. David, do you want to give us a little bit of background around this topic?
David: We saw a few papers online about work from home arrangements. I guess we haven't talked about it on the podcast. It has been very topical, obviously since the start of Covid. But before then, organizations were working through flexible arrangements for much of the last decade. Even in today's global financial press, the CEOs of Amazon, Microsoft, and others are coming out and talking about their feelings about work from home arrangements. Who are the winners? Who are the losers?
At the end of the day, I think that into the future, organizations are going to have these working at home hybrid working type arrangements. I think this is an important question for us to consider on the podcast.
Drew: Yeah. As you mentioned, this is something we've been looking at for a while. During Covid, there were lots of papers that were rushed out as people tried to be really topical and provide useful advice really quickly. But the longevity of the research and the strength of the research, particularly for such an important topic that is going to hang around, the papers just didn't do it justice. This is one of the first papers that I think takes a really solid scientific look as part of a decent project into safety of working at home.
David: Drew, would you like to introduce the paper and then we can get straight into it?
Drew: Yup. This is a multi-university collaboration funded by the Center of Work Health and Safety in New South Wales. There are eight authors. I won't list all eight of them, but the lead author is Tim Bentley of Edith Cowan University. Professor Bentley is a mid career researcher. He's got pretty broad interests in work, health, and safety, stretching across wellbeing, mental health, older workers, remote workers, psychosocial safety. Hopefully that paints a bit of a picture and gives you some understanding of why he's leading this work into work from home.
The paper is called A systems model for the design of occupational health and safety management systems inclusive of work from home arrangements, which is a little bit of a mouthful, but just generally accept that as we're designing something for health and safety for work from home. It's published in the Journal of Applied Ergonomics. The research method they've called co-design, which I don't think it's something that we've covered on the podcasts before.
David: I don't think we have, Drew. No.
Drew: I'll just go through the method from start to end so you get some sense for how it works. Prior to this particular paper, they've already done a number of steps. They've done a literature review of work from home, work during Covid, psychosocial safety, that sort of thing. They've done a quantitative survey that went out to a large number of flexible workers. And they've done an interview study of flexible workers and their managers. A lot of setup background understanding the problem space.
For this particular study, they had five focus groups with a total of 23 participants, four OHS staff, two HR managers, three work from home workers, three line managers, three senior managers, and eight regulators. That may sound like a little bit of an odd mix, and we'll get into that balance and how it affected the research a bit later on.
The overall idea of co-design is that you're going through a number of cycles, where the researchers and the participants are looking at commenting on and improving the same work product. In this case, the work product is a framework for managing the safety of workers from home. They go into the first focus group with lots of data that's already been analyzed, then that focus group reviews and revises the framework, pointing out problems, pointing out issues, making insights. The researchers revise the model presented to the next focus group, the next focus group to the next focus group, improving it each time.
Eventually they have a final framework, which they send back to everyone so that people who were in the first couple of focus groups get to see what it finally looked like and make further comments. David, what do you think about the choice of participants? We're doing safety of work from home, and we've only got three people who work from home, but eight regulators in the focus.
David: That obviously stood out, Drew. Three line managers, three senior managers, three OHS people, so you've already got nine people who represent management's interests in organizations, and then you've got regulators who represent government and community interests. Out of all of those 23, you've got three people who are actually considered work from home workers, which is the group that we're trying to understand.
I would have liked to have seen that far more balanced, Drew. I don't know the right number, but I'm thinking 50% work from home workers and 50% other people, because I'd be worried that, like you said at the start, safety of work versus work of safety, I'd be worried that these different groups have slightly different views over what safety management is.
Drew: Yes, I would have liked to see more balance myself. I would have liked to see which group participants came from reported in the findings so that we had some idea about which were the needs of regulators being met by this, which were the needs of management being met by this, which were the needs of workers.
I will say injustice to the researchers, at this point of the project, they've already done two big studies focusing on the workers themselves. It's not that the researchers were ignoring those workers. It's just that in this particular piece of research, that's not what they were doing. They do, in the discussion, point out the big risk of leaving workers out at this stage, which is that we don't capture any diversity.
There's a risk that we're missing important contributions from workers with different needs, neurodiverse workers, workers with mental health issues, workers with particular reasons working at home. I'm not going to be able to comment on the framework and how it might affect them. That is a limitation that they acknowledge, but it is still a big limitation of the work.
I think it comes from the way the Center for Workplace and Health Safety sense to set up grants, where they want researchers to promise a toolkit at the end of every project. The more work you put into the earliest stages, then the smaller and fewer participants you've got in that toolkit phase. That's what's happened here. They've done the early stages really well, and they've done this last stage with the resources and the people that they had to get the toolkit produced.
David: Drew, there's some background in the paper from these other previous studies and the literature review that have been done in building up to this study. Should we talk through some of the, I guess, themes and issues that had been surfaced in the previous work?
Drew: Sure. This is just like a collation literature review. The researchers aren't necessarily specifically endorsing any of these ideas. They're just what comes up in the literature. The first one they point out is the problems with participation and representation of workers when they're working from home. It's important for health and safety that worker views are considered in how we manage safety.
At least in Australia and in the UK, it's actually a legal requirement that we include that worker voice, but it's hard to get a worker voice when the workers are not physically there. Even if you get one or two workers, how do you know that they're representing the other workers? Because they're not all in the same workplace, they may all have their own individualized concerns. Health and safety rep isn't really wrapping when they're just working by themselves.
David: Yeah, it's a great point, Drew. That leads on to hazard identification. The central part of our safety management arrangements, which is the identification, understanding, control of hazards, the conclusion is that many of these approaches in organizations are designed around traditional working arrangements, the mechanisms by which people report, the way of the communication, and resolution can happen, is very much assuming a more traditional work arrangement.
Drew: Yup. That goes not just for the hazards themselves, but also for checking that the whole system of hazard identification, risk management is working. We rely a lot on supervisors seeing what's actually going on and knowing when their attempts to manage hazards are working. We just lose that visibility, so we're reliant on the reporting system, rather than the reporting system being a reflection of lots of day-to-day monitoring activity.
David: That's a really good point, leadership inspections, walkthroughs, senior leadership visits, just the presence of the people, and even health and safety personnel. Their time in the field or time at the workplace, so to speak, all of that doesn't happen in the traditional way with working from home arrangements.
Drew: The next big factor is what the actual hazards are. There's a whole range of things that we want risk and hazard assessment to cover. But what's going to be important depends on what the environment is.
There's a lot of research now. Covid has sped up the size and quality of this research, which says that working from home increases exposure to some very specific hazards. A lot of those are psychosocial, social isolation, workload, and the just the number of different demands that people need to deal with, work and family conflict, and bullying and harassment. It's not that that's going to automatically happen when you work from home, but the rate of those things goes up significantly, and the severity of those things goes up for work from home workers.
David: Which is interesting Drew if I think about risk perception. This is where a study involving a more balanced group of people, maybe not at this point in this study or another study, because I think many work from home workers claim that working from home flexible hybrid arrangements actually assist them to lower their overall risk and hazards associated with psychosocial risks. It's really interesting that research is suggesting a different view.
Drew: You're right, David, that this is obviously going to depend on the individual, their family circumstances, and what things are like at work. For someone like myself, for whom like hell is other people, working from home takes away a huge amount of stress and potential for interpersonal things to go wrong. But for someone who gets their value and productivity out of conversations in the corridors, that's what keeps them going, thriving, and feeling important, valued, and doing good work, then working from home is going to take away a lot of that positive feedback that helps them engage.
David: It's not just the researchers point out. It's not just, I guess, maybe traditional systems not being inclusive of these types of risks and how to manage them, but also that these risks might actually be more poorly understood by workers or their management. It's missing from the system, but it's also missing from the knowledge and the capability of workforce and management as well.
Drew: Yeah, we'll get onto this a bit later. A lot of our OHS practitioners lack both training and confidence in dealing with psychosocial issues. It's a fairly new thing to expand the bounds of responsibility to include those hazards as part of safety. It's something where even as researchers, we have big gaps.
For example, one of the things that they point out in this paper is no one really knows why bullying and harassment is associated with work from home. Isolation is an obvious mechanism, but why is bullying worse? We don't really know, and it hasn't been thoroughly studied. That's going to make it hard to put in place good preventative strategies when you know that it's something that you have to work with, but you don't know why it's occurring, so we don't have great solutions.
David: I guess the last piece just to point out is also the access to information. We know companies obviously have, I guess, a range in quality of online tools and systems to find information. The very fact that people working at home means that the IT arrangements need to be, I guess, at least at a minimum acceptable level. That being said though, the research still seems to point out that it can be harder to access and find information being outside of the workplace.
Drew: David, I'm surprised that that one came up, because it implies that workers are actually looking up health and safety policies on their company's intranet, and then someone actually trying to do it from home and finding out that they can't. Win for the companies, and the people are actually looking for the information online. Not a win that when they're working from home, it's hard to get that information and yet need a VPN to make it work. It just gets more complicated.
David: Yeah. We'll talk about the framework and then, I guess, the suggestion for a toolkit coming at the end of this study. There seems to be six main themes that have come through in this research. Should we talk to those?
Drew: Yeah. I think we can go through these fairly quickly, because the value I think is in what they finally came up with. The first theme is to do with the regulatory environment. No surprise, when you talk to a bunch of regulators, they tell you that work practices during Covid were evolving faster than regulations could keep up. You've got this widespread adoption of work from home arrangements, and you've got regulation that assumes that work is happening quite differently.
What I think is really interesting, though, is what that reveals about how we think about regulators, because we're supposedly under a gold based regime, where the regulator doesn't patronize companies and tell them what to do. They're supposed to be setting high level standards that should be irrelevant to the particular type of work practice, but we're clearly still in a state where at least some of the regulators and at least some businesses are expecting the regulator to be very hands on in telling workplaces how they should handle particular types of work.
The Robins Report was all about stripping back detailed requirements so companies would think for themselves and be constantly aware of safety. It seems at least in Australia at the moment, companies need a detailed code of practice telling them how to think for themselves. The regulator is quite happy to do that and thinks that it's part of their job. I don't think that's necessarily good or bad, it's just an interesting mismatch between philosophy and what regulation actually works in practice.
David: Yeah. I think for those listeners outside of Australia, this research was conducted exclusively inside Australia. There are references there to go base regimes. Robins Report is very much the model of regulation in this country, other Commonwealth countries, and other countries around the world.
There are, however, rule based regimes. It will be interesting to extend some of this research or studies. If this is a topic of interest about the relationship between regulators and organizations, and what specifically organizations are looking for in respect of regulation, then I think that would be best done as an international research project.
Drew: Yeah, I'd be very interested to see now that we've had multiple countries doing post Covid studies, whether we now start to have comparisons of those studies and see how different countries coped with workplace health and safety during Covid and during the general shift to more flexible work arrangements and work from home.
The second theme, they've labeled as leadership, but it's quite an interesting take on leadership. It's about how willing organizations were when they start having all of these psychosocial hazards being reported up through the reporting systems, how willing they are to treat that as safety and as something that management needs to seriously respond to, versus how much it's just treated as out of scope or irrelevant for safety.
It shows that Leadership isn't just telling people safety is important. It sets the tone on what counts of safety, what support we as an organization think is our responsibility, and what we're willing to offer to our employees.
David: It's interesting, I think, just in this finding that we've been talking for more than two decades, since we've been working hard on more open reporting cultures in organizations, when organizations' number of incident reports go up and up and up. We struggle to understand, is that a sign of worsening safety? Or is that a sign of better reporting? That debates feed around for a very long time.
I think what we're seeing here is a similar debate. When companies create these psychosocial hazard reporting systems and start to talk more openly about it, then it may be inevitable that there's a much larger volume of these issues being surfaced in the organization.
I think that sometimes creates the same protective response from managers not really wanting to speak meaningfully about this, maybe not really wanting to deal with systemic issues, being worried that all these issues are a reflection on their leadership. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because I can see a lot of parallels to what we've done in safety starting more than 20 years ago.
Drew: Yeah. I think there's a couple of very legitimate things that management are concerned about. Psychosocial hazards tend to look a lot more like direct criticism of management, because they're often about relationships between workers and their managers. It does come across as much more direct criticism, which is much harder to receive.
There's also a legitimate concern that, hey, we're not psychologists. We could do as much good if we try to handle this stuff that we are clearly not equipped to deal with. It can be some quite legitimate trying to draw the lines about what a company can and can't or should or shouldn't take responsibility for.
David: Yeah, and I think leaders aren't engineers necessarily, or hygienists, or ergonomists. It's just not a special skill that leaders need to be able to draw on. I see that as definitely part of the discussion, but I also think that I still don't know if that's any different to any other technical health and safety risk issue in the organization.
Drew: Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with you there. I do think that's interesting that safety people will quite happily step into a physical issue that they don't have a lot of expertise about. But because it's like physical invisible, they think they've got enough expertise to deal with it. I shouldn't even say safety people, managers as well are often in that same case.
If you put an issue inside someone's heads, it's much more obvious to them that they might lack the expertise to speak credibly about it. It's not a new problem. How do I manage something that I'm not an expert in myself? But people are quicker to realize when it comes to psychology that maybe they're not experts than they are when it comes to design of staircases or design of risk assessment systems.
David: Yeah, that was, I guess, that broad leadership category, and then they talked specifically about line management. You talked about psychosocial hazards and risk being—I don't know if it's sometimes or often—about the relationship between people in their manager, people in their work, or people in their coworkers. But what do they have to say about line management?
Drew: This is where I personally think it starts to get interesting and where later on, they're going to make a really useful contribution, because line managers are really where the support is needed, and where there are things we may be able to do as an organization to directly help. Line managers are faced with this difficulty of, how do you show commitment and support to remote workers at the same time as showing that you trust them?
You know that it's important to stay in touch, you know it's important to communicate, you know it's important not to leave them by themselves, but the last thing you want to do is seem like you're constantly checking up on them, that you don't trust them, and that you think they're not working. It's easier to casually stop by when you're in the same office than it is to just casually stop by when someone's working at home.
This has a lot of effect on line managers' own workloads, their sense of security, their own psychosocial safety. They were thrown into this during Covid with no training or suggestion on what are the best ways to manage this. What are some practical guides for how do you establish that relationship? How do you establish the communication? With little understanding of, how do you pick up on the signs of a worker who is uncomfortable, unhappy?
If you're seeing them in the office every day, you notice they're not themselves. But seeing them over Zoom or Teams, of course they're not themselves. They're sitting on a space station with a cutout figure of their face. How do you really know how they're feeling and what's going on?
David: The fourth topic is about teams and individuals. This feels more like a work group type of level. Do you want to share some insights here?
Drew: I don't think that there's much that's hugely insightful here, except that so much of safety relies on good communication, regular flow of information, and in particular, two way communication, not just a podcast. That breaks down vertically and horizontally when people are working remotely. You've got physical separation, you've got mental separation, you've got an extra activation energy for any instance of communication, all of which makes communication more formal, more one way, less information content, and less casual informal content that is often important for safety.
David: Yeah. Drew, I have seen some research over the last couple of years talking about reduced trust among teams, so teams that don't have that physical, regular contact with each other, rather than assume good intent can sometimes start by assuming bad intent, because they just don't have established relationships and trust amongst each other.
Also, one example that I wouldn't mind sharing is from a utility organization that I'm aware of, where the real challenge is between teams that can work from home and teams that can't. In this instance, it was a natural network control room environment, where the controllers had to physically be in the office. But a lot of the support staff, human resources, safety, finance, were all working from home.
The first few times that the team actually needed some health and safety advice, they do what they used to do, walk out to the area where health and safety sits, and no one's sitting there. They tried to reach a few of them, and they can't get a hold of anyone, and then they just go on and make an operational decision because they have to. That health and safety team feels very excluded by operations for, why didn't they consult me? Why didn't they ask me? The operations team has learned that help is not there for them anymore in a timely way that they need it to be.
It was really challenging as to whether it was creating physical risk in the organization around safety, but also the psychosocial risk of both teams. The control room team that felt isolated from support in the organization, and the health and safety team that felt excluded from activities and decisions that they thought they should be involved in. I just shared that example. I don't know what your thoughts are with that example, but it actually created some really significant operational and organizational challenges.
Drew: Yeah. It's interesting how you can have two groups of people simultaneously feel that they've been abandoned. The people who were there in the building, and the rest of the building is empty, they feel that everyone else has left, and they're being ignored and forgotten, left behind. The people stuck at home are thinking, well, now we're at home, but we've been forgotten about. We've been left out here disconnected, no one's paying attention to us, and no one's reaching out to us.
There's been research for decades that have said, the number one factor in trust is not something sophisticated like emotional intelligence, interpersonal relationships, or anything like that. It's simple familiarity. The more you physically see someone, the more you trust them regardless of anything else. The more we physically separate people, the more they become strangers, and there's just that lack of assuming good intent.
David: Drew, we've talked a lot about psychosocial hazards associated with remote work, and we'll talk about the safety management system application to those hazards. But there are some physical hazards, I guess, that have been topical even pre-Covid around the extent to which organizations need to support individuals to manage the physical hazards in their home environments, their desks, their chairs, their staircases, their kitchens. This research offer much in the way of organizations responding to that geographically diverse set of physical hazards.
Drew: I don't think they say a lot that's new about it, but they do highlight just how inconsistent organizations approaches are and perhaps, the need for just some standardized guidance on what is an organization responsible for when you ask to work from home or when they ask you to work from home. On the one hand, you've got people who say, working from home is a privilege, you choose to do it, here is a risk assessment template, check your own ergonomics, tell us if there's a problem.
At the other extreme, you've got, well, wherever we set you up to work, we make sure that you've got to work from home environment. Here is your kit, here is the link to the local office works that's going to provide it, and we will actually set you up with a workstation, equipment, and everything that we think is appropriate and suitable. Between those extremes, there's just varying degrees of expectation and responsibility for whose responsibility is that environment.
David: This paper didn't resolve that outstanding issue, but just, I guess, brought it to the attention again. Drew, they go into a large suggested, I'm not going to call it a toolbox for flexible working, but it's areas where perhaps tools are required. How much do you want to talk through some of these?
Drew: This first bit, which if you're reading along the table, this is table two, they call it a toolbox for flexible working. Most of the topics in here are actually just references to other toolboxes. They say, we need some sort of tools for legislation, codes of practice, guidelines, and policy. Basically, that's clarity about responsibilities for psychological safety, clarity about responsibilities for the ergonomic work environment.
We need tools that support the physical work environment, making sure that it's ergonomic, making sure that the hazards from working from home are understood, making sure that it's clear to the workers and to the managers whose responsibility is what. We need tools for senior management for planning, for things like risk assessment and policies and procedures that provide other tools to people.
It goes on about accessing professional assistance, communication, measuring performance, collecting, monitoring data, building capacity, building interpersonal skills, and providing tools for teams. That's a toolbox, but it's a toolbox of a need for tools. It doesn't get much beyond that.
After that table is where I think they get really, really useful. They talk about, what does a manager actually need from a toolbox? This is, I think, a list. It's a short list, but it's stuff that a health and safety team could make sure that you were providing each of these things to your managers when they're responsible for working from home.
David, feel free to jump in with any of these with elaboration. The first thing is managers need a tool for onboarding. How do you get in a new employee, particularly if their first day at work is going to be at home? Or how do you onboard someone into the work from home environment when they've previously been in the office environment? What are the things that you need to take care of to make sure that the situation is set up to start with?
Managers need tools for navigating the employee manager relationship. They've got all this uncertainty about, how do I reach out? How do I avoid sounding like I'm checking up? They just need advice, practical things that they can do so that they're not just left in the dark having to invent their own strategies for communication.
Tools for managing feelings of isolation. How do they manage their own feelings? What's the advice when an employee reaches out to you and says, I feel isolated? What are some things you can say? What are some things you can do?
What are the limits? Where do you need to start seeking professional assistance? What are you expected to take care of as a line manager? What are you expected to reach out to health and safety or HR for as a line manager? What types of services are available?
I guess this particularly refers to things like employee assistance packages, but line managers need that to be on hand. If they're working from home themselves, they can't just have a link to an intranet that they can't access. Telling an employee, I'll look up the EAP on the intranet, is not a good answer when someone is in distress.
Managers need resources for team building. Often, managers have been given some training in team building that applies when people are physically present, but they need instruction and possibly even training in interpersonal skills for managing team building in that new environment. And then there are some more advanced things that are still important.
For example, how do you have necessary, difficult, or sometimes powerful conversations online? Things like performance management or boundary setting, those are much harder to do when you're not face to face, and they can go badly, badly wrong when they're done remotely and you don't have that sense of feedback. It's a particular set of skills. It needs not just advice, it needs actual training and practice with triads to have a go at it, get it right, and build those skills. How do you conduct risk assessment or respond if a hazard is identified through risk assessment when the employee is working from home or in some alternate location?
I thought this was a really interesting add. How do you assess the suitability of services? How do you know when you send someone off to the EAP that they're actually getting help and that you're not just shoving them off onto a service that's not going to be helpful? How do you know what services are good, what services are not good, and that employees are getting the extra help they need if they need extra help? David, your thoughts on those?
David: Yeah, I think that's a really good list of 10 or 12 things that health and safety professionals and practitioners could be considering right now. To what extent does my organization have support, resources, direction tools for these types of issues. To what extent are we just leaving managers to try to work it out for themselves? I think this is a really good part of the paper, Drew. They're a little bit more limited on what employees need, but they still made some, I guess, conclusions about what employees need.
Drew: Yeah, they've got a short list and most of these are unsurprising. Employees need guidance on identifying and reporting hazards and risks. I'm not so sure about that one. I'm not sure if that's particularly useful or helpful.
Resources about self-care. That really depends on the quality of those resources. There are some good stuff there. Particularly, some employees benefit a lot from reminders, guidance, and assistance for self-care. David, I don't know about you, but our company sent everyone a chocolate Freddo during Covid. It was just really, really nice to have a piece of chocolate arrive in the mailbox. It's just a reminder, you're at home, but we haven't forgotten you.
Self-care can actually help. It's just got to be done well. Similarly, things like building resilience can be naughty, but if done well, it really is helpful. Guidance on managing the boundaries of work and home when working remotely. They don't mention it, but I think actually helpful knowing the organization's expectations in managing those boundaries is also important.
Do we expect you to be at your desk from nine to five, or do we expect it will be available from certain hours? Is it okay to turn off your phone when you would normally be traveling to and from work? Those things. How do you respond appropriately when you are feeling uncomfortable or when you are feeling that your well-being is threatened? It's pretty hard to take a day off when you're already not in the office, so what are the right ways to do that? David, your thoughts on any of those ones?
David: Yeah. I think this is an area where organizations, I guess, have started. I don't want to say that this is exactly like our physical safety world that we've got history is. This list is a little bit like the PPE and the administrative requirements that we've imposed on physical safety risks for a long time. I think this is where I see organizations starting.
That list of management tools that can help leaders create the environment to identify and manage the hazards and risks associated with the team has been left to the side in in my observation by a lot of the things directed specifically at trying to increase the resilience and support for for workers, which is part of it and also can be a little bit more of a reactive solution to solving these or working with these issues.
Drew: Yeah, I like the way they prioritized it in this paper. That's what I would recommend to someone who was trying to manage this in your organization. Start with providing the tools to the frontline managers, because they're doing most of the support for frontline employees anyway. If you equip them well and make sure they're set up for success and manage their well-being, that will flow directly to the employees, whereas a lot of the stuff from the employees just risks not landing and not being effective if it's targeted too directly at the front line.
David: Should we go to some practical takeaways?
Drew: Yes. Just before we do , I do just want to acknowledge that the paper does contain a lot more interesting general discussion beyond this. They put a lot of thought into the relationship between psychosocial, physical hazards, exactly where those boundaries are, and how that plays into the different levels of competence and confidence when OHS practitioners are trying to deal with things that they know they've got to deal with, but that are outside their immediate expertise. We won't go into more of that now for the nature of time, but that's a good reason to pick up the paper and read it as if you're interested in the negotiation of those issues.
On to takeaways. The first one that I've got here is just when managing issues such as work from home, it's easy to fall into the trap of either just very vague and useless principles like resilience or really precise and useless ergonomic checklists. I do think that there is a useful middle ground, particularly for line managers, where you can identify what they need from you as an organization. Those needs can be met by providing them with tools, guidance, and just some practical advice for how to manage different things.
David: Compared with what we're seeing at the moment a little bit in the financial press of dealing with things on "case by case basis" or on average three days a week in the office, or your performance review and bonus will consider your presenteeism in the office at the end of the year. That's not so much providing any tools and resources, but just trying to provide a set of principles and maybe a little bit of fear to encourage a behavior that the organization wants without, I guess, the management of the risk associated with it.
Drew: Yeah, we don't have this as a takeaway, but I think a lot of people's response to work from home is, let's try to subtly discourage it, because we're uncomfortable with it at the same time as we recognize that it's probably inevitable. That's a pretty awkward space to be in where you're just turning a blind eye to what's actually going to happen.
The second takeaway is that safety is always more about relationships and communication than it is about risk assessments and reporting hazards. Working from home isn't new in that regard, it just makes it really obvious and highlights that relationships and communication aren't vague things. They're things that we can support people in, they're things that we can train people in, they're things we can provide people with tools to manage, and that's what we need to do, not provide tools for that hazard identification.
David: Drew, your third one that you've got there?
Drew: The third one I've got is just that one size doesn't fit all. The big one in this paper is safety strategies for work from home are different from safety strategies from work at work. It divides down further that we've got people working from home, we've got hybrid workers, we've got workers who work at different offices, or even just people who are on part time contracts and don't shop on Fridays, and we always have the meeting on Fridays. We need our broad safety strategies to acknowledge the different shape that work can take, and then we need to make sure that we provide specific support where there are specific issues within each of those different types of work.
David: The comment that I had at the end and going back to what you mentioned at the start that a lot of this is about the work of safety, we've got existing safety management systems and practices in all of our organizations and. There's an opportunity to stop and review all of those practices to, I guess, see the extent to which they support the full range of working arrangements, hazards, and risks. There's everything from what we've spoken about today, risk management, leadership training, emergency response, supervision. How does this all work in these diverse and different working arrangements?
Drew: David, this doesn't come from the paper itself, but you just raised what I think is an interesting idea, which is we're obliged to regularly review our practices and systems, but we're very seldom told what to review them for. Actually, having a specific focus each time you have a review can be really effective in identifying a whole range of different issues, even some not related to that. Going through every practice and system and saying, how would this work for someone at home, might actually reveal some interesting things that apply to a lot of different cases.
David: Yeah, I think that's a good point, Drew. I've been looking at all of my safety management systems, documents, and practices. Anything with an issue date of 2019 or before, I'd suggest maybe a prime candidate to consider with that question.
Drew: Yup.
David: Drew, the question that we asked this week was, how do we manage safety for work from home workers?
Drew: The short answer this time is that there definitely isn't a short answer. This paper comes from a larger project, and I know that the people who did the work have gathered together a list of existing resources and toolboxes. As part of this project, they've even created a few prototype tools, training packages, and stuff themselves.
What I'd say is if you're in Australia and you're interested in this, maybe reach out to one of the authors and take them out for coffee. We'll tag them in the show notes, on Safety Exchange, and LinkedIn for this episode. Hopefully, someone will actually get something out of it and build some connections.
David: Great. Drew, that's it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought provoking and ultimately useful in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Join us in the discussion online or send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.